Rendezvous With Rama

chapter 26. The Voice of Rama
The real magnitude of his adventure did not hit Jimmy Pak until he reached the coast of the Cylindrical Sea. Until now, he had been over known territory; barring a catastrophic structural failure, he could always land and walk back to base in a few hours.

That option no longer existed. If he came down in the Sea, he would probably drown, quite unpleasantly, in its poisonous waters. And even if he made a safe landing in the southern continent, it might be impossible to rescue him before Endeavour had to break away from Rama's sunward orbit. He was also acutely aware that the foreseeable disasters were the ones most unlikely to happen. The totally unknown region over which he was flying might produce any number of surprises; suppose there were flying creatures here, who objected to his intrusion? He would hate to engage in a dogfight with anything larger than a pigeon. A few well-placed pecks could destroy Dragonfly's aerodynamics. Yet, if there were no hazards, there would be no achievement - no sense of adventure. Millions of men would gladly have traded places with him now. He was going not only where no one had ever been before - but where no one would ever go again. In all of history, he would be the only human being to visit the southern regions of Rama. Whenever he felt fear brushing against his mind, he could remember that. He had now grown accustomed to sitting in midair, with the world wrapped around him. Because he had dropped two kilometres below the central axis, he had acquired a definite sense of "up" and "down". The ground was only six kilometres below, but the arch of the sky was ten kilometres overhead. The "city" of London was hanging up there near the zenith; New York, on the other hand, was the right way up, directly ahead.

"Dragonfly," said Hub Control, "you're getting a little low. Twenty-two hundred metres from the axis."

"Thanks," he replied. "I'll gain altitude. Let me know when I'm back at twenty."

This was something he'd have to watch. There was a natural tendency to lose height - and he had no instruments to tell him exactly where he was. If he got too far away from the zero-gravity of the axis, he might never be able to climb back to it. Fortunately, there was a wide margin for error, and there was always someone watching his progress through a telescope at the Hub.

He was now well out over the Sea, pedalling along at a steady twenty kilometres an hour. In five minutes, he would be over New York; already the island looked rather like a ship, sailing for ever round and round the Cylindrical Sea.

When he reached New York, he flew a circle over it, stopping several times so that his little TV camera could send back steady, vibration-free images. The panorama of buildings, towers, industrial plants, power stations - or whatever they were - was fascinating but essentially meaningless. No matter how long he stared at its complexity, he was unlikely to learn anything. The camera would record far more details than he could possibly assimilate; and one day - perhaps years hence - some student might find in them the key to Rama's secrets.

After leaving New York, he crossed the other half of the Sea in only fifteen minutes. Though he was not aware of it, he had been flying fast over water, but as soon as he reached the south coast he unconsciously relaxed and his speed dropped by several kilometres an hour. He might be in wholly alien territory but at least he was over land. As soon as he had crossed the great cliff that formed the Sea's southern limit, he panned the TV camera completely round the circle of the world.

"Beautiful!" said Hub Control. "This will keep the mapmakers happy. How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine - just a little fatigue, but no more than I expected. How far do you make me from the Pole?"

"Fifteen point six kilometres."

"Tell me when I'm at ten; I'll take a rest then. And make sure I don't get low again. I'll start climbing when I've five to go."

Twenty minutes later the world was closing in upon him; he had come to the end of the cylindrical section, and was entering the southern dome.

He had studied it for hours through the telescopes at the other end of Rama, and had learned its geography by heart. Even so, that had not fully prepared him for the spectacle all around him.

In almost every way the southern and northern ends of Rama differed completely. Here was no triad of stairways, no series of narrow, concentric plateaux, no sweeping curve from hub to plain. Instead, there was an immense central spike, more than five kilometres long, extending along the axis. Six smaller ones, half this size, were equally spaced around it; the whole assembly looked like a group of remarkably symmetrical stalactites, hanging from the roof of a cave. Or, inverting the point of view, the spires of some Cambodian temple, set at the bottom of a crater...

Linking these slender, tapering towers, and curving down from them to merge eventually in the cylindrical plain, were flying buttresses that looked massive enough to bear the weight of a world. And this, perhaps, was their function, if they were indeed the elements of some exotic drive units, as some had suggested.

Lieutenant Pak approached the central spike cautiously, stopped pedalling while he was still a hundred metres away and let Dragonfly drift to rest. He checked the radiation level, and found only Rama's very low background. There might be forces at work here which no human instruments could detect, but that was another unavoidable risk.

"What can you see?" Hub Control asked anxiously.

"Just Big Horn - it's absolutely smooth - no markings - and the point's so sharp you could use it as a needle. I'm almost scared to go near it."

He was only half joking. It seemed incredible that so massive an object should taper to such a geometrically perfect point. Jimmy had seen collections of insects impaled upon pins, and he had no desire for his own Dragonfly to meet a similar fate. He pedalled slowly forward until the spike had flared out to several metres in diameter, then stopped again. Opening a small container, he rather gingerly extracted a sphere about as big as a baseball, and tossed it towards the spike. As it drifted away, it played out a barely visible thread. The sticky-bomb hit the smoothly curving surface - and did not rebound. Jimmy gave the thread an experimental twitch, then a harder tug. Like a fisherman hauling in his catch, he slowly wound Dragonfly across to the tip of the appropriately christened "Big Horn", until he was able to put out his hand and make contact with it.

"I suppose you could call this some kind of touchdown," he reported to Hub Control. "It feels like glass - almost frictionless, and slightly warm. The sticky-bomb worked fine. Now I'm trying the mike... let's see if the suction pad holds as well... plugging in the leads... anything coming through?"

There was a long pause from the Hub; then Control said disgustedly: "Not a damn thing, except the usual thermal noises. Will you tap it with a piece of metal? Then at least we'll find if it's hollow."

"OK. Now what?"

"We'd like you to fly along the spike, making a complete scan every half-kilometre, and looking out for anything unusual. Then, if you're sure it's safe, you might go across to one of the Little Horns. But only if you're certain you can get back to zero gee without any problems."

"Three kilometres from the axis - that's slightly above lunar gravity. Dragonfly was designed for that. I'll just have to work harder."

"Jimmy, this is the Captain. I've got second thoughts on that. Judging by your pictures, the smaller spikes are just the same as the big one. Get the best coverage of them you can with the zoom lens. I don't want you leaving the low-gravity region... unless you see something that looks very important. Then we'll talk it over."

"OK, Skipper," said Jimmy, and perhaps there was just a trace of relief in his voice. "I'll stay close to Big Horn. Here we go again."

He felt he was dropping straight downwards into a narrow valley between a group of incredibly tall and slender mountains. Big Horn now towered a kilometre above him, and the six spikes of the Little Horns were looming up all around. The complex of buttresses and flying arches which surrounded the lower slopes was approaching rapidly; he wondered if he could make a safe landing somewhere down there in that Cyclopean architecture. He could no longer land on Big Horn itself, for the gravity on its widening slopes was now too powerful to be counteracted by the feeble force of the sticky-bomb.

As he came even closer to the South Pole, he began to feel more and more like a sparrow flying beneath the vaulted roof of some great cathedral - though no cathedral ever built had been even one hundredth the size of this place. He wondered if it was indeed a religious shrine, or something remotely analogous, but quickly dismissed the idea. Nowhere in Rama had there been any trace of artistic expression; everything was purely functional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind.

That was a chilling thought, quite alien to Jimmy's usual not-very-profound philosophy; he felt an urgent need to resume contact, and reported his situation back to his distant friends.

"Say again, Dragonfly," replied Hub Control. "We can't understand you - your transmission is garbled."

"I repeat - I'm near the base of Little Horn number Six, and am using the sticky-bomb to haul myself in."

"Understand only partially. Can you hear me?"

"Yes, perfectly. Repeat, perfectly."

"Please start counting numbers."

"One, two, three, four..."

"Got part of that. Give us beacon for fifteen seconds, then go back to voice."

"Here it is."

Jimmy switched on the low-powered beacon which would locate him anywhere inside Rama, and counted off the seconds. When he went over to voice again he asked plaintively: "What's happening? Can you hear me now?"

Presumably Hub didn't, because the controller then asked for fifteen seconds of TV. Not until Jimmy had repeated the question twice did the message get through.

"Glad you can hear us OK, Jimmy. But there's something very peculiar happening at your end. Listen."

Over the radio, he heard the familiar whistle of his own beacon, played back to him. For a moment it was perfectly normal; then a weird distortion crept into it. The thousand-cycle whistle became modulated by a deep, throbbing pulse so low that it was almost beneath the threshold of hearing; it was a kind of basso-profundo flutter in which each individual vibration could be heard. And the modulation was itself modulated; it rose and fell, rose and fell with a period of about five seconds.

Never for a moment did it occur to Jimmy that there was something wrong with his radio transmitter. This was from outside; though what it was, and what it meant, was beyond his imagination.

Hub Control was not much wiser, but at least it had a theory.

"We think you must be in some kind of very intense field - probably magnetic - with a frequency of about ten cycles. It may be strong enough to be dangerous. Suggest you get out right away - it may only be local. Switch on your beacon again, and we'll play it back to you. Then you can tell when you're getting clear of the interference."

Jimmy hastily jerked the sticky-bomb loose and abandoned his attempt to land. He swung Dragonfly round in a wide circle, listening as he did so to the sound that wavered in his earphones. After flying only a few metres, he could tell that its intensity was falling rapidly; as Hub Control had guessed, it was extremely localized.

He paused for a moment at the last spot where he could hear it, like a faint throbbing deep in his brain. So might a primitive savage have listened in awestruck ignorance to the low humming of a giant power transformer. And even the savage might have guessed that the sound he heard was merely the stray leakage from colossal energies, fully controlled, but biding their time...

Whatever this sound meant, Jimmy was glad to be clear of it. This was no place, among the overwhelming architecture of the South Pole, for a lone man to listen to the voice of Rama.